Stand

The documentary tells the life of the basketball player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. He was born Chris Jackson and was taken third in the 1990 NBA draft. He then converted to Islam and changed his name. In March 1996 he refused to stand during the national anthem, giving as his reason both his faith and what the anthem said to him. The NBA suspended him indefinitely and without pay. An accommodation was then found: he would stand, but hold his hands out in prayer. He received death threats, and the house he was having built for his family in Mississippi was burned down. The film has him tell all of it himself, more than twenty years later. Joslyn Rose Lyons’s hundred and seven minute American documentary was completed in 2023.